MH-266 Thavius Beck - DialogueOn Dialogue, his third full-length for Mush Records, Thavius Beck continues to push the boundaries of hip-hop beatmaking, grounding lo-fi digital drum kits in icy layers of synths and sliced up samples. Fresh off of production duties on Saul Williams’ Niggy Tardust album with Trent Reznor, Beck’s work on Dialogue is razor sharp. This release also finds Thavius spending more time in front of the mic, delivering the type of rhymes that originally gained him notoriety as a member of Global Phlowtations. The consummate iconoclast, Beck cleverly critiques many of America's ills with a dry, satirical wit that never falls into preachiness. With each passing release, Thavius Beck continues to prove that the only musical boundaries he sees are ones he has already left behind.

It's an impressive illustration of what hip-hop can and should be:adventurous, demanding and energising. Will.I.Am take note. - Clash / One of the Best Albums of 2009. - LA City Beat / His flow is as unremarkable as his conscious, anti-mainstream message. You can hear flickers of a possible new hip-hop.- The Wire / Buy it, play it, freak yourself out. - The Skinny

That Thavius Beck – he has a right mouth on him, always cussin’ and the like. And just how does he manage to squeeze all those words into such a small window of time? It’s like he’s working at 405 RPM – 405 revelations per minute. In fact there are likely to be broadband speeds in Japan unable to cope with this level of speed and bandwidth. In fact you need fibre optic ears to even begin to appreciate the droning, buzzing signal rate of tracks like ‘Hardcrore’ and the sweet cyber overtures of ‘IDC’. This isn’t rap exactly. This isn’t Hip Hop exactly. It’s not anything exactly. Beck sees a musical boundary, bends it, flexes it, stamps on it, smashes it, smelts it down to within an inch of its ore and then trangresses it. Rules are there to be broken, patience is there to be stretched and cultural attitudes are there to be challenged. So cue up a touch of drum n bass, lashings of raw techtronica and more warp drive than you can throw at an alien ‘wessel’. Beck’s vocals may struggle to rise above the general whirr of some very central beats but it’s exactly the kind of feeling you get in the city. You can look at it two ways: the noise of the traffic either drowns you out entirely or forces you to think that bit louder. And this is a similar experience: penetrating highs and lows you could almost moisturize with. Food for the faithful.